Computational Complexity and other fun stuff in math and computer science from Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch

Monday, April 03, 2006

The Terror of the Unabomber

Ten years ago today federal agents went to a remote cabin outside
Lincoln, Montana to arrest one Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the
Unabomber.

Just a couple of months before I started graduate school at Berkeley
in 1985, one of the students in that department, John Hauser, picked
up a package in the computer science lab that detonated and cost him
some fingers and his vision. We all had heavy warnings about opening
packages during orientation, what a way to start graduate school.

I didn't think much about the Unabomber again until 1993 when Yale
University CS professor David Gelernter was injured when a package exploded in
his hands. At this point the FBI sent major alerts to all of the CS
departments including Chicago and started interviewing faculty about
former students. The Unabomber became the main topic of discussion
and many of us became very careful about opening any package until his
capture in April 1996.

Many students today have never heard of Kaczynski or the Unabomber as
he safely spends the rest of his life behind bars. But this
mathematician turned bomber made us quite scared and paranoid back in
the mid-90's.

Not 100% certain about the Cory signs, but there are certainly still signs warning about suspicious packages and mentioning several "recent" mailbomb incidents hanging around McLaughlin Hall (Berkeley's engineering administrative building), which have been there since at least 1998. Though I'm pretty sure the signs David mentions in Cory date back to at least the '90s, too.

It was quite a shock when David Gelernter was specifically targeted and extremely seriously injured by one of Kaczynski's letter bombs. David Gelernter was a member of the CS family, someone whom I had recently heard speak in a panel on parallel computing at a workshop affiliated with STOC 1991, someone whom it was hard to imagine anyone could hate.

Even if you thought that your theory research was unlikely to make you a target, any of your colleagues might be, which would put you at risk, too. Day-to-day, however, our reactions were more like denial than paranoia; although we did the quick mental check of each fat envelope to make sure that it did not match the unabomber letter properties, at some level we blocked out the thought that we really could be targets, despite evidence to the contrary. It would have been hard to function otherwise.

When I was in high school the columbine shootings occured. All of a sudden, the students turned into both the enemy and the victims. At least at my school the security became tighter and the teachers distanced themselves from the students. I imagine that the looming sense of fear was similar to your descriptions here.